bRoKeNgRiN

I stuffed my throat, eyes, and pockets full of roses. I tied myself up with heartstrings. I set myself on fire.

A golden eclipse was emblazoned upon the back of his eyelids. The crisp, morning light, an event horizon on the surface of his vision. He found it so peaceful to lie here; watching the fire dance on the skin of his eyes, to see the distortion such a simple veneer could have on life. Everything was different depending on perspective. A certain paradigm is an important thing; it discerns life or death, true or false, love or hate. A simple problem can be interpreted, and solved, in several different ways. Untying the Gordian Knot is either a complex puzzle or a simple chopping manoeuvre. John Tullock admired and cherished this, as it meant in

I swept out the corners of my mind today In short shallow strokes Not knowing if the dust disturbed my life Or if my life disturbed the dust.

it's midnight and I'm writing love letters on my skin to the woman who raised me. it's midnight and every limb has a story. all my collarbone remembers is the frantic hurry of your footsteps when it broke under the weight of gravity and mistaken desire to fly and my broken pink umbrella, long-gone, remembers too. my elbows remember the firm pull of your hands in the grocery store. my cheeks remember your makeup and my clumsy fingers dipping in like paint pots and my neck remembers all your strands of pearls. I remember when you were young again and wearing red and holding cups of tea in hands that didn't shake yet and I remembe

it was too late;          far too late,   by the time my gaze found his across the dim and drunken      tangle of a scene. his eyes were dark, the color   of burning wood and dust in a foreign country, the     kind of eyes my mother taught   me to fear, and rightly so;             i could already feel his             handprints welling in a          &#

Do's and Don'ts of Time Travel So, you've finally done it. You've scraped together the millions of dollars, dozens of passports, countless vaccinations and hours and hours of anachronistic language classes. The day is at long last here, and you are ready to take that romantic little vacation – through time. Yes, time travel is everything you've been told. You will meet exotic people, doing exotic things in exotic eras. You will get to see the "Good Old Days" when they were better known as "These Wretched Times." But, before you hit the app button on your genius phone, there are a few things you should know: Time Travel Don'ts Don't s

They walk ahead of me almost holding hands, a puffy red heart almost suspended above them in a conjoined dream cloud, and I almost stab it with my cigarette, send it sputtering and whining into the night. Tomorrow while I'm taking out the trash I imagine each of them will be dictating love letters to a friend, each planning their ascent and subsequent colonization of the other: she'll teach him to wear deodorant more often, take off his socks before they go to bed, while he'll convince her Hemingway is a saint and Emily Dickinson is Martha Stewart. While I'm rinsing off a spoon, running the garbage disposal, they'll be on th

I love how you feel like a Billie Holiday song, or a blues poem crammed affectionately in my back pocket with a half- life in cigarettes. There is a science to our forgetfulness, maybe it was the smoke that made you vanish, or the gin, or maybe it was when I surpassed the proper amount of yearning. Walking home that night, heavy with empty glasses and last requests, I hummed an old jazz tune and surrendered to it.

Elliot is four. He watches his grandfather breathe out cigarette smoke in his creaking armchair. The living room is small enough to be heated by the portable radiator near his grandfather's slippers. When the old man realises his grandson waits for him, he begins. "This is a ruined world, son. Diseased with hatred and war before you were born." He takes a drag on his cigarette and Elliot breathes in the coming smoke. "This world is dead, but I know there's another. We could go to it if we only knew the way." Elliot's grandfather smiles at his thoughts. "There's another place put aside for us. I'll find the door one day." The radiator splutt